Crumpler Thomas

This study explored how ideologies of language and literacy and social and academic identities were constructed and contested during a literature discussion. In the event, a group of five (and later six) boys in a fourth grade bilingual classroom attempt to identify an unknown word in their novel: booger. Microethnographic discourse analysis and analyses of participants’ movements across the classroom were conducted, and interpretations were informed by spatializing theories of social practice and identities. Findings illustrate how the students’ and teacher's physical and discursive moves involved the negotiation of multiple ideologies of language learning. Findings suggest the need for a deeper understanding of the micro-level processes in which academic and social identities and learning opportunities for students are forged.

We consider how research participants engage alongside researchers as choreographers of data generation and highlight the everyday practices of researchers and participants in motion within and across time and space. Data for this case analysis were generated during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and literacy teacher development. We utilized microethnographic discourse analysis to analyze a video excerpt from a classroom observation during writers workshop in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom. We sought to understand how the teacher’s and students’ discursive moves during the event tactically disrupted the researchers’ agenda in the moment and complicated attempts at data analysis. Our analyses illustrate how the teacher multiply situated herself in ways that trouble dichotomous framings of teachers’ work, such as traditional or nontraditional, as well as dominant conceptualizations of qualitative research, such as data “collection.” We end with implications for interpreting and representing research findings.

In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to examine how a fourth-grade teacher negotiated multiple and competing ideologies of literacy and teaching, and how these negotiations related to her professional identity. Data for this case study were collected during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and teacher development. The researchers used constant comparative analysis and microethnographic analysis of talk and visual data to investigate how the teacher positioned herself with respect to four different space-times impacting her literacy instruction (i.e., standardization, bilingual education, writers' workshop, novice teacher status). Findings demonstrate how her positioning involved the tactical recontextualization and creative adaptation of discourses across these space-times as she poached off institutional powers to refashion curriculum, classroom spaces, and her teacher identity. These negotiations illustrate the microscopic and everyday dimensions of power and how literacy instruction and teacher identities are coconstructed in the particulars of everyday practice. In tandem with the analyses, the researchers argue for a syncretic theoretical framing and micro-level analytic approach to literacy research to account for the particularities of discourse and classroom practice, and their potential to both reproduce and contest dominant ideologies of literacy and teaching.